This study makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of the enormous popularity of Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the later Middle Ages. Previous studies of Saint Catherine have identified her multifunctional adaptability as key to that popularity. Similarly, Cynthia Stollhans explores the representation and reinvention of Saint Catherine in Rome by focusing on a number of specific visual portrayals, dating from the High Middle Ages to the early modern period. Some of these have already been the subject of substantial analysis: for example, Masolino’s fresco cycle in the church of San Clemente, commissioned by Cardinal Branda Castiglioni, and Pinturicchio’s depiction of Saint Catherine debating with the philosophers, created for the notorious Borgia pope Alexander VI. Others are less well known, such as the apsidal painting of Catherine with three hermit saints to be found in the Sant’Onofrio (the church of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Jerome) and the image of Catherine teaching, which appears in the Theodoli family funerary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo.

The book’s subtitle is Case Studies in Patronage, and the value of Stollhans’s analysis lies in her consideration of how these representations of Saint Catherine reflect the interests and (in some cases) sociopolitical needs of those who commissioned them. She makes a strong case for devotion to Catherine as an act of self-fashioning, arguing, for example, that Cardinal Castiglioni’s decision to have scenes from her life painted opposite to scenes from the life of Saint Ambrose speaks to his status as a native of Milan, who played a conspicuous role in early fifteenth-century attempts to resolve the schism between Eastern and Western churches. Such considerations here, and in the other depictions considered, help to make sense of the choice of specific scenes from Catherine’s life, or of particular saintly companions to set alongside her. Stollhans’s careful analysis of the details of individual representations (such as clothing and gesture) is further enhanced by her reading of them within the context not just of patrons’ interests, but of the physical, architectural settings. Thus she considers exactly who would have had access to these images and the implications of this for our further understanding of their creation and nature.

To date, the female constituent of Catherine’s devotees has tended to receive more detailed scholarly attention; thus, one of the most useful aspects of this study is its detailed consideration of male interest in Catherine. Stollhans convincingly contends that the conspicuous high-status male religious devotion to Catherine in Rome accounts for the clear emphasis in Roman art on the saint’s status as an educated and rhetorically able figure. The male patrons’ own intellectual abilities and/or aspirations inform the frequency with which she is depicted as debating with and triumphing over the fifty philosophers charged with proving the fallacy of her Christian beliefs. Stollhans has even uncovered evidence that indicates that Saint Catherine was regarded by some in Rome as a doctor of the Church.

Overall, this book suggests a number of informative and intriguing conclusions about the dynamics of Saint Catherine’s cult within a specific setting. However, the scope of these is, unfortunately, somewhat limited by a failure to thoroughly engage with existing work on the cult’s manifestation elsewhere. There is only brief discussion of scholarship on Catherine at the outset and some key recent works are omitted, notably Tracey Sands’s 2010 study of the cult in Sweden, and Anne Simon’s 2012 account of the cult in Nuremberg (the latter also published by Ashgate, which makes its omission particularly surprising). Stollhans emphasizes the value of regional studies in illuminating our overall understanding of a saint’s cult and further argues that visual evidence reveals that Catherine was “Romanised,” which may well be true. But in order to substantiate claims about the distinctively Roman nature of these depictions, there needed to be more systematic comparison to other regional studies of her cult to highlight areas both of similarity and difference in her appropriation by comparable patrons elsewhere. Nonetheless, Stollhans has produced an engaging work that will doubtless stimulate further interrogation of this most fascinating of saints.